In Fall 2020, 37 Civic Digital Fellows worked at the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Institutes of Health as part of Coding it Forward’s first-ever fall cohort and second virtual cohort. The Civic Digital Fellowship is the first of its kind internship for mission-driven student software engineers, data scientists, product managers, and designers to innovate at the intersection of technology and public service.
Meet the fifth cohort of Civic Digital Fellows: Introducing the Fall 2020 Civic Digital Fellows.
This repository features the slides that Fellows presented during their respective end-of-fall presentations at their host agencies. View a recording of Coding it Forward’s virtual end-of-fall celebration, with keynote remarks from Jennifer Pahlka, the founder of Code for America and a former Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer.
Kindly note that if a Fellow's biography does not have a link, their work is not publicly available.
Jesid Acosta is a Master's student at University of South Florida studying Business Analytics and Information Systems. This fall, he worked at the Census Poverty Statistics Branch improving data quality checks for published poverty estimates by automating this annual process. His work will lead to a 70% increase in coverage for data checked and a significant savings in time and resources. | Presentation
Elliot Bearden is a rising senior at Grand Canyon University studying Information Technology. This fall, he worked at the National Institutes of Health assisting with the discovery, definition, and designation review for new “person-focused” common data elements with the goal to capture and analyze the socioeconomic context of COVID-19 cases and better understand social determinants of health for both the current pandemic and future far- and wide-reaching health events. | Presentation
Nina Bernick is a rising senior at Yale University studying Applied Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering. This fall, she worked at the National Institutes of Health in the Division of Neuroscience and Behavior at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to develop a new tool to enhance documentation, standardization, and training for Program Officers to complete Program Checklists, which are used for reviewing and entering assurances and administrative prerequisites that require approval in accordance with the general terms and conditions of award. | Presentation
Alana Burrell is a junior at Spelman College studying Computer Science and Computer Engineering. This fall, she worked at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Skin Diseases within the National Institutes of Health to develop a data management roadmap that will reduce IT infrastructure costs, increase productivity, and support changing research needs. | Presentation
Maria Burzillo is a rising senior at Harvard University studying Applied Mathematics. This fall, she worked at the Census Bureau to develop interactive dashboards of social health indicators for the Enhancing Health Data Program (EHealth). In addition to creating EHealth's first interactive data visualizations using Tableau, Maria worked to reduce the barriers to future dashboard creation and publication by creating guides and compiling resources for future EHealth Tableau users. | Presentation
Hadley Callaway is a rising senior at Columbia University studying Computer Science. This fall, she worked alongside Tiffany Duong at the National Institutes of Health STRIDES Initiative to help the team expand in various areas in need of project management and software engineering expertise. Together they laid the groundwork for NIH-wide GitHub usage by conducting 22 interviews, making a proposal to senior NIH leaders in favor of GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and writing an implementation plan. In addition to this, Hadley worked on automating STRIDES team tasks to save roughly six weeks of work. | Presentation
Geovani Castro is a rising senior at the University of Washington studying Computer Science. This fall, he worked at the National Institutes of Health assisting with the discovery, definition, and designation review for new “person-focused” common data elements with the goal to capture and analyze the socioeconomic context of COVID-19 cases and better understand social determinants of health for both the current pandemic and future far- and wide-reaching health events. | Presentation
Hoyin Chu is a rising senior at Northeastern University studying Computer Science and Mathematics. This fall, he worked in the Office of Data Science and Emerging Technologies at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases within the National Institutes of Health to develop an R package that serves as a pipeline to automate the creation of Data Access Committee activity reports. This work will save significant time for Data Access Committees across all of the National Institutes of Health and allow them to make better decisions for the scientific community. | Presentation
Ruben Cuevas is a rising sophomore at Stanford University studying Computer Science. This fall, he worked at the National Institutes of Health to build a hack-in-a-box. This tool automates the planning and structure that goes into NIH codeathons and will both cut down on the time needed to prepare for a codeathon and empower less tech-savvy people with the tools to run a codeathon. This project creates and manages Google invites, Slack workspaces and channels, invitations, and Github repositories, all with the click of a button. Presentation
Apoorva Dhanala is a rising junior at the University of Georgia studying Computer Science with an emphasis in Artificial Intelligence. This fall, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau to perform industry classification using public data from the 2017 Economic Census for a Machine Learning pipeline. | Presentation
Vishal Dubey is a rising sophomore at Duke University studying Computer Science. This fall, he worked at the National Institute of Aging within the National Institutes of Health to research probabilistic linkages and hashing algorithms for datasets. His work in correctly identifying parties across multiple datasets and evaluating current approaches has implications in error analysis in many different domains. | Presentation
Tiffany Duong is a rising junior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studying Information Science. This fall, she worked alongside Hadley Callaway at the National Institutes of Health STRIDES Initiative to help the team expand in various areas in need of project management and software engineering expertise. Together they laid the groundwork for NIH-wide GitHub usage by conducting 22 interviews, making a proposal to senior NIH leaders in favor of GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and writing an implementation plan. In addition to this, Tiffany refined STRIDES team learning and development opportunities by creating personas for STRIDES customers. | Presentation
Emelin Flores is a rising senior at Rutgers University where she studies Information Technology and Political Science. This fall, she worked at the National Institutes of Health creating technical documentation on metadata organization, privacy tools and metrics, and Honest Broker implementation at the NIH. Emelin also analyzed repository metrics to provide suggestions on how to improve resource usability by incorporating emerging technologies. | Presentation
Neve Foresti is a rising senior at the University of California, San Diego studying Cognitive Science with a Specialization in Design and Interaction and Speculative Design. This fall, she worked at the Census Bureau to increase public engagement with federal open data through the design of the Census Open Innovation Lab's Data Curation Hub. Her project included user research, usability tests, service blueprints, and an interactive digital prototype. | Presentation
Michelle Gan is a rising junior at Stanford University studying Computer Science. This fall, she worked at the National Institutes of Health to develop a machine learning model to predict the future usage of Sequence Read Archive (SRA) data in order to optimize cloud storage costs. Michelle also explored web analytics for the NCBI SARS-CoV-2 Landing Page.
Tony Goss is a rising senior at Tufts University studying Computer Science and Civic Studies. This fall, he worked at the Census Bureau on a team that is linking data from the criminal legal system with Census' survey and administrative records, with the goal of providing a centralized, robust database of the ways the interaction with the criminal legal system affects people’s outcomes in life (i.e, what percentage of people are employed five years after incarceration?). Specifically, Tony worked on automating a process for running queries and producing reports based on this linked data for use in sending back to the local and state criminal agencies. | Presentation
Christopher Grey is a rising senior at the University of California, Berkeley studying Data Science. This fall, he worked at the National Institutes of Health to model common data elements to aid in prediction of heart failure.
Arianna Israel is a rising senior at Mills College studying Interdisciplinary Studies. This fall, she worked at the Census Bureau to create an internal tool and data pipeline for HIV/AIDS pandemic visualizations leveraging public data published by country governments, UNAIDS, and PEPFAR. | Presentation
Andy Jin is a rising junior at Stanford University studying Computer Science. This fall, Andy Jin worked at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) within the National Institutes of Health to employ machine learning to predict grant application priority scores. In particular, he used XGBoost decision trees, natural language processing on grant application content, and feature engineering on meta-data from participants in NIDA's training programs to predict the factors that drive the success of independent grant funding for F, K, and R mechanisms. This project will not only inform NIH program staff about the key drivers that contribute to grant application success, but will also serve as a resource to aid program staff when advising prospective grantees on their grant submissions.
Sophie Kaplan is a rising junior at Emory University studying Computer Science and Applied Mathematics and Statistics. This fall, she worked at the Census Bureau to develop methods for standardizing and centralizing internal data systems. This included an automated process of finding associations between file naming language, as well as implementing a search feature for traversing Census internal data. | Presentation
Noah Kopf is a rising senior at Yale University studying Ethics, Politics, and Economics. This fall, he worked at the Census Bureau to standardize, compile, and document fourteen years of data from the Survey of Sexual Victimization. The standardized data will allow the Bureau of Justice Statistics to publish more comprehensive reports that include greater historical context for understanding current trends. It will also facilitate easier exchange of data between the Census Bureau and BJS as both agencies can now utilize a unified data structure and format that works for the needs of both agencies. | Presentation
Connie Liu is a rising sophomore at Cornell University studying Information Science (UX and Interactive Technology). This fall, she worked at the National Institutes of Health with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). At the NLM, she helped understand major pain points with the budget process and tools and provide recommendations to make it more clear and efficient. At the NIBIB she designed an Education section on the IMAG Wiki geared towards the public (especially novices interested in modeling), to inspire the next-generation of computational modelers to the field. | Presentation
Patricia Luk is a rising senior at New York University studying Mathematics and Data Science. This fall, she worked alongside Leo Saenger at the Census Bureau to improve the survey design of the Economic Census through quantitative analysis of paradata. Paradata is a record of respondent actions produced while completing the survey. They evaluated certain aspects of the 2017 Economic Census and provided recommendations for the design of the 2022 Economic Census to improve data quality and ease respondent burden. | Presentation
Sarah MacHarg is a rising sophomore at Stanford University, where she is currently deciding on a major. This fall, she worked at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with a trans-NIH team of mentors to help standardize and promote the use of common data elements (CDEs), with the goal of making data collected by NIH-funded studies more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). The NIDDK Central Repository is one of many NIH-maintained repositories that manage resources from multi-center and large single-center studies. Sarah's project aimed to improve researchers’ ability to harness this wealth of data by beginning to develop a natural language processing pipeline that detects CDEs in repository studies and drafting recommendations for improving repositories’ metadata collection and access procedures. | Presentation
Maia Materman is a junior at Olin College studying Computer Science focused in Human Centered Design. This fall, she worked in the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the National Institutes of Health to landscape current data science projects and develop a strategic vision and objectives for data science more broadly at NCATS. Presentation
Timothy Nguyen is a senior at the University of California, Santa Cruz studying Computer Science and Technology Information Management. This fall, he worked at the National Institutes of Health in the National Institute on Aging’s Division of Behavioral and Social Research (BSR) to create a product line/roadmap and recommend a cloud environment where data can be shared broadly from multiple data sources that are supported by BSR (e.g., Health and Retirement Study, Midlife in the United States, and the National Health and Aging Trends Study). These ongoing longitudinal studies are often linked with other data sources (e.g., Social Security Administrative Data, CMS claims data) but the process for accessing and cross-linking studies is cumbersome and labor intensive and BSR’s website does not provide useful guidance on utilizing these resources. Tim’s project involved identifying the most cost efficient manner of using cloud-based systems, such as the NIH STRIDES program or Desktop as a Service (DaaS), to enhance scientists’ access to these resources and providing interactive examples. | Presentation
Chae Eun Park is a rising senior at Georgia Institute of Technology studying Industrial Design. This fall, she worked at the National Institutes of Health to expand the cloud initiatives at the National Center for Biotechnology Information. She conducted user research on cloud curious users in order better understand their needs. Her research will help to improve outreach and help facilitate adoption of NCBI cloud data and tools. | Presentation
Isaac Robinson is a rising junior at Harvard University studying Mathematics and Computer Science. This fall, he worked at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) within the National Institutes of Health creating tools and metrics to quantify the impact of NLM grants, with the goal of seeing which new industries, patents, and innovations can be traced back to NLM. | Presentation
Alyssa Romanos is a rising senior at Stanford University studying Computer Science. This fall, she worked at the National Institutes of Health to build a custom processor in Apache NiFi to parse and validate electronic health records and create data linkages between All of Us data and Census data. | Presentation
Leo Saenger is a rising junior at Harvard University studying Applied Mathematics and Economics. This fall, he worked alongside Patricia Luk at the Census Bureau to improve the survey design of the Economic Census through quantitative analysis of paradata. Paradata is a record of respondent actions produced while completing the survey. They evaluated certain aspects of the 2017 Economic Census and provided recommendations for the design of the 2022 Economic Census to improve data quality and ease respondent burden. | Presentation
Sikata Sengupta is a rising junior at Stanford University studying Mathematics and Economics. This fall, she worked at the Census Bureau in the Economy-Wide Statistics Division, collaborating with Drishaan Jain (CDF Summer ‘20), to create and refine revenue imputations for the annual County Business Patterns dataset. | Presentation
Jianna So is a rising senior at Stanford University studying Product Design and Computer Science. This fall, she worked at the Census Bureau’s Open Innovation Labs to ensure the Innovation Lab’s annual and now-virtual Demo Week conference would be an engaging and inclusive online experience for conference attendees. After journey mapping the experience for different groups, she helped create an empowering, professional, and fun brand for the event through Adobe Illustrator and After Effects. The branded publicity materials were used to publicize Demo Week and in materials during the event, which had over 1,000 registered attendees, over 100 speakers, and over 4,000 unique views on the YouTube livestream. | Presentation
Vinay Tummarakota is a rising sophomore at Rice University studying Computer Science. This fall, he worked at the National Institutes of Health to automate the identification of publicly available aging-relevant databases. Through the use of web scraping and machine learning, Vinay developed a script which provides an efficient method of identifying publicly available aging-relevant databases for aging researchers. | Presentation
Aviva Weinbaum is a rising junior at Barnard College studying Computer Science. This fall, she worked at the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program to create new data pipelines and linkages to make the intake of electronic health records easier as well as bring in EPA and Fitbit data to the program to enable researchers to study environmental and social determinants of health. | Presentation
Eleane Ye is a rising senior at Duke University studying Public Policy and Computer Science. This fall, she worked at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Skin Diseases within the National Institutes of Health to develop a data management roadmap that will reduce IT infrastructure costs, increase productivity, and support changing research needs. | Presentation
Rui-Jie Yew is a rising senior at Scripps College studying Computer Science and Math. This fall, she developed a Python-based Administrative Record Lookup File and Query System for users to generate customized extracts of the information they need. This work supports the evolution of the Census Bureau's efforts to enhance survey and census-taking through the use of linked data. | Presentation
Grace Zhou is a rising junior at Stanford University studying Computer Science. This fall, she worked at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) within the National Institutes of Health to improve the UI/UX of the IMAG wiki. She streamlined the workflows for computational modelers to contribute content, find models and collaborate in this wiki environment. | Presentation
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